First of all, a major portion of Today's Jeeping involved Greta getting a couple of hours of clay-barring, a thorough wash, some much-needed waxing and then a quick detailing.

Pictured: The results were well worth the effort.

Greta getting a mall-worthy clean-up was not the interesting part of Today's Jeeping, however; the interesting part came about when I opened a package that randomly showed up in the mailroom at Muppet Labs...and after going through it I have to admit that this is one of the more entertaining parcels that I've had the pleasure of opening, lately. The following picture shows what was concealed within.

Pictured: Excerpting the gnome and toaster, of course; we already had those.

Inside the box there was a bottle of hot sauce, a potentially-explosive seasoning mix, an engraving of a Vault-Tec mascot and a Mysterious Note...and although that's a pleasantly-random mix of items any way you cut it the real entertainment came about when I read the Mysterious Note. For those of you that may not be able to read the text of that Note, I've magnanimously reproduced it here; you can thank me later.

...

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

Included in this Vault-Tec care package are several items of potential interest. Please take inventory of items upon recieval of care package, and ensure proper item retrieval.

Item 1. One bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce. Applied liberally to meats (especially chicken) prior to cooking, it adds a little punch to any meal! But remember, the longer the soak, the BIGGER the burn!

Item 2. One bottle of Head Country Seasoning. Produced in partnership with Blamco Foods, this seasoning works well to season meats, particularly if cooking over an open flame. Be careful though, if properly atomized, it can lead to flash explosions.

Item 3. One Vault-Tec Token. Present this limited edition token to any Vault-Tec representative, and receive a free Vault-Tec lunch box! This is our way of saying Thank You for participating in the building of Vault 108.

Thank you for your time!
- The Vault-Tec Team

P.S. We have reviewed your request, and at this time we must deny your request for entry into Vault 108.

...

To explain the rationale behind this package I have to make a guess...and my guess is that this package is the result of what happens when someone sends me "something interesting" in exchange for some official R.O.D. swag.* So, with that explanation out of the way: thank you, Chris...you made the Wasteland far more interesting than I had expected it to be, today.**

*- Annabelle wants you to PM her about shirts, by the way. **- I think there's something seriously wrong with you.

If it's worth doing, then it's worth overdoing.

The Republic of Dave: Bringing you the finest in simian testing supplies.

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In all seriousness, that chrome-cap lugnut business is just annoying, I hate it when the caps come off. I pre-empted mine and replaced them all before they could become a problem.

I despise the lugnut covers; I want to get them replaced entirely but I just haven't gotten around to ordering a set of decent ones, yet. I need to put that higher up on my priority list; maybe after I get the engine paint and what-not ordered I'll invest in the lugnuts. That's all depending on employment, of course...

That was several hours with a clay bar, and her paint seriously needed the attention...and when I say that, I actually mean "I threw the clay bar away when we were done." It had gone from pink to a greyish-orange hue; the iron-heavy dust around here plays merry hell with light-colored paint, as I'm sure you well know.

Today's Jeeping: futher daily driver research - there's a third contender in the mix, now - and a bit more detailing work on the engine.

If it's worth doing, then it's worth overdoing.

The Republic of Dave: Bringing you the finest in simian testing supplies.

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I decided that I was feeling a bit racy yesterday evening so it seemed as good a time as any to attempt the extraction of the broken manifold bolts, and since I was in the aforementioned mood, I decided to take a shot at welding a nut to one of the buried bolts and pulling it out...and it worked perfectly.

Pictured: For once, something was radically easier than I expected.

The people whom suggested the welding route could not possibly have further understated the simplicity of this method. There's literally nothing to it: I held a scrap nut in a pair of needle-nose Vise-Grips, fired up the welder, held the nut over the broken, recessed and wire-brushed-as-much-as-was-possible bolt and then shot a relatively decent weld into the center of the nut...and when I ever-so-gently applied a wrench to it, the damned thing came out with no more than the barest whimper of protest. The threaded hole in the head was in beautiful shape, too; I hand-spun a chamfering bit around the already-chamfered hole to clean up a couple of microscopic pieces of welding spatter and I was basically done...and then everything fell apart when I moved to the other side.

I won't bore you with the gruesome details; simply put, it took sixteen attempts before I managed to weld a nut to the broken bolt with enough integrity to allow me to get the f****** thing out of the aluminum head...and it didn't do with with nearly the same amount of cleanliness as the first exhibited. I did everything the same as I had done with the first one, but no matter how well I wire-brushed and cleaned the broken bolt face and no matter how carefully I positioned the welder and the nut, fifteen welds in a row broke with barely any torque applied to them...and at least one of them caused some damage to the threading. When I finally managed to get a bolt to hold - and that weld sounded beautiful going in, by the way - I realized that the resistance that the bolt was showing to being extracted was not due to any amount of corrosion or stickiness within the threading itself, but rather due to a portion of weld that had spilled out and was trying to cut its way through the aluminum of the head; a half-turn brought it free of the head so there wasn't severe damage, but even after I gave it a bit of hand-chamfering and a light dressing with a piece of wetted 2000-grit paper it still wasn't pretty.

Picture: But it could have been worse.

If you look at the 3 o'clock position on the hole in the center of the photo, you can see where the weld tried to cut into the aluminum; since there wasn't a single bit of weld that seriously stuck to the head in any other location I can only assume that I got the wire off-center at some point and lightly gouged that portion of the metal...or, conversely, that I burnt out a bit of corrosion and filled the resulting gap with weld. Either way, there wasn't any significant damage to the head...hell, it barely even got warm, despite more than a dozen HOT welds put directly adjacent to it. Incidentally, all of the blackish-looking stuff on the manifold faces in the preceding photos are the corroded remains of the manifold gaskets that stuck to the aluminum; I've been using a combination of brass brushes, razor blades and retardedly-light block sanding to take this stuff off...and yes, I'm using a dead-flat piece of aluminum as the backing block to the sandpaper, which ensures that there's no gouging of the mating surface. It's still nerve-wracking, though...I'll be glad when it's done, much as I'm glad that the broken bolts have been freed with less damage than could have been had. Here's a shot of them after being pulled out.

Pictured: Guess which one was the problem.

If you guessed "the one on the left!" then you're either lucky or observant; if you look carefully you can see the small tooth of welded metal that scored the aluminum threading. After I got it extracted I checked to make sure that a bolt would still thread in with no problems; I was relieved to find that it would...so now all I have to do is get the remainder of the gasket material off of the exhaust manifold faces of the heads, do a tiny bit more cleanup, and then I can mask off the important parts and get a coat of paint on this thing!

If it's worth doing, then it's worth overdoing.

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Yep...that's the first picture I ever took of Greta, and it was snapped about nine minutes after I brought her home to Muppet Labs for the very first time. She looks a bit different now; scrolling back and forth between this image and that poser shot I posted a couple of days ago is kind of fun.

If it's worth doing, then it's worth overdoing.

The Republic of Dave: Bringing you the finest in simian testing supplies.

The build, the gear, and the mileage: To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.